More homeowners miss mortgage payments

Delinquencies predicted to stall economic recovery

A new $1.1 million, 5,200-square-foot home in Davie, Fla., is offered for short sale in this May 13 photo. The number of homeowners who missed at least one payment on their mortgage surged to a record in the first quarter of the year, a sign that the foreclosure crisis is far from over.

Washington  The mortgage crisis is dragging on the economic recovery as more homeowners fall behind on their payments.

Analysts expect improvement soon, but the number of homeowners in default or at risk of foreclosure will have a lingering effect on the broader economy.

More than 10 percent of homeowners with a mortgage had missed at least one payment in the January-March period, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Wednesday. That’s a record high and up from 9.1 percent a year ago.

A big jump in the number of borrowers who have missed three months of mortgage payments drove the increase.

One encouraging sign is the number of homeowners just starting to show trouble is trending downward. As of March, nearly 3.5 percent of borrowers had missed one month of mortgage payments, down from about 3.8 percent a year earlier.

Around 4.3 million homeowners, or about 8 percent of all Americans with a mortgage, are at risk of losing their homes, the trade group’s top economist estimates. They have either missed at least three months of payments or are in foreclosure.

Should loan modification programs fail to help, their homes will go up for sale either as a foreclosure or short sale — when the bank agrees to sell the property for less than the original mortgage amount.

Many analysts have been forecasting home prices will dip again as more of these homes go up for sale at deeply discounted prices.

“It’s certainly a weight on the economy,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, who predicts home prices will fall about 5 percent and hit the bottom next spring. “Nothing works all that well in the economy when house prices are falling.”

Federal tax credits boosted home sales this spring, but they expired last month. As a result, mortgage applications to purchase homes fell to the lowest level in 13 years this week, the Mortgage Bankers Association said in a separate report Wednesday.

The latest foreclosure figures from the trade group are adjusted for seasonal factors. For example, heating bills and holiday expenses tend to push mortgage delinquencies up near the end of the year. Many of those borrowers become current on their loans again by spring.

Without adjusting for seasonal factors, the delinquency numbers dropped, as they normally do from the winter to spring.

More than 4.6 percent of homeowners were in foreclosure, also a record. But that number, which is not adjusted for seasonal factors, was up only slightly from the end of last year.

Jay Brinkmann, the trade group’s chief economist, said the foreclosure crisis appears to have stabilized.

Seasonal adjustments may be exaggerating the change from the previous quarter, he added.

The Obama administration’s $75 billion foreclosure prevention program has barely dented the problem.

About 25 percent of the 1.2 million homeowners who started the program over the past year had received permanent loan modifications as of last month. About 23 percent of those enrolled dropped out during a trial phase that lasts at least three months. Many more are in limbo.

Economic woes, such as unemployment or reduced income, are the main catalysts for foreclosures this year. Initially, lax lending standards were the culprit. But homeowners with good credit who took out conventional, fixed-rate loans are now the fastest growing group of foreclosures.

Those borrowers made up nearly 37 percent of new foreclosures in the first quarter of the year, up from 29 percent a year earlier.

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Comments

"Nearly 15 million people are officially counted as unemployed in the United States, and more than 6 million of these have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks. Another 11 million are the “hidden” unemployed:"

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We will leave a burden for our grandchildren if we don‘t rebuild our aging infrastructure, break our reliance on fossil fuels, and provide all our children with an excellent education."